Can Amtrak survive three more years of Bush?

The United States needs strong regional passenger-rail systems, linked across the country to provide alternatives to highway grids already choked by autos and fast-growing fleets of freight trucks.

It should be a matter of simple common sense, patriotism and high priority.

But the Bush administration, never stingy with favors and subsidies to private corporate interests, can't bear the fact that Amtrak, the only national rail system we have, has been receiving more than $1 billion a year in subsidies for capital and operations.

Last winter, Bush recommended zero-budgeting for Amtrak. Then, last month, he had his hand-picked board fire David Gunn, Amtrak's highly respected president. The move prompted consternation to fury in Amtrak's remarkably broad, bipartisan congressional support group. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., put it most colorfully: "Amtrak is now being run by a board made up of members who have virtually no experience in passenger rail. ... Mr. Gunn was fired because he would not agree with 'FEMA-tizing' Amtrak."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2002678361_peirce12.html

I personally doubt it.

The crony staffed board of directors will make sure of that. Laney the chair is a Texas B*sh funky, the Sec of Transportation Stormin' Norman Marionetta who does not attend but sends a stand in is part of the board and shrub made two recess appointments (neither of which know what a train is)the legality of which is in question as Amtrak is a private corporation registered in DC and recess appointments are for federal officers.
They are laying off trained food service employees and having Subway sandwich franchisees put minimum wage teenagers of trains to hawk their goods. They are planning to eliminate all freshly prepared meals on all trains.
They have held secret discussions to sell off the most financially lucrative portion of their railroad.
Amtrak has refused to negotiate with most of their labor organizations for six years, thus the employees have not had a wage increase in six years. Great for Morale! Amtrak knows that under the railway Labor Act that strikes are nearly impossible and if they do happen guess who steps in. That's right folks the president appoints a board to make recommendations that if they are not taken Congress then imposes them.

is often obscured by the cooperation between local officials and members of Congress that typically has still has some small success in bringing home local mass transit funds. But the bottom line remains that (with its deliberately imposed dependence on the private motorcar and the internal combustion engine), America's transportation system is the most expensive, most viciously discriminatory and least efficient in the industrial world: public-interest-be-damned corporate welfare at its very worst.

Moreover the Bush Administration, the Republican Party and the plutocrats the Republicans represent have absolutely no intention of allowing any meaningful change. In fact their intent is to make the present situation much worse.

Republican hostility to public transportation dates at least to the Herbert Hoover era and is merely another expression of the relentless Republican malice toward government services that help anyone save the very rich. The hostility peaked during the Reaganoid years, when vast sums of money originally budgeted for the construction and expansion of mass transit were shifted into the defense budget, and it is now predictably peaking again under Bush.

Not that any Democrat since LBJ has been much better: four years of Carter and eight years of Clinton could have given us public transport the equal of Europe's, but the opportunity was deliberately squandered -- with the result we are now stuck with an ever-worsening, ever-more-bus-centered (and therefore ever-more Oil-Baron-dependent) system while the very railroads that could save us are increasingly ripped up and moronically converted to playlands.

As always, there is method to the apparent Bush madness -- another example of how the idiotic notion "Bush is stupid" hides the vicious reality of his cunning. Knowing that rail is the ONLY rational mode of public transport -- electrically powered rail at that (with buses minimized to providing supplemental service only) -- Bush responds by doing everything to make rail service appear to be uncomfortable, inefficient, costly, accident-prone: precisely the same tactic he uses to discredit any government service that does not specifically benefit the oligarchy. The purpose behind Bush's war on AMTRAK is the furtherance of Bush's war on ALL public transport.

Alas, it really is too late. AMTRAK service may yet be maintained at its present levels, but the lost rail passenger service -- to literally thousands of locales and tens of thousands of cities and towns -- will never be replaced. In the 1950s you could ride trains literally everywhere in the U.S., but with ever-more-inflated real estate costs (a direct measurement of the increasing worthlessness of the dollar and therefore a trend that will never be reversed) the land acquisition costs essential to restoring that service are permanently prohibitive.

This is all the more infuriating when one knows -- as anyone familiar with the history of U.S. transportation does -- that our passenger railroads were methodically destroyed, specifically to increase the profits of Big Oil and Big Automotive. Our local electric rail systems -- streetcars, interurbans and the like -- were deliberately shut down for precisely the same reason; the Bush scheme to discredit rail transport is as much a plan to discourage the construction of local rail systems as it is to destroy what remains of the national rail system.

And by all indications Bush is succeeding, just as Reagan succeeded before him. Which means the U.S. will enter the era of peak oil with minimal transport and that mostly herky-jerky buses -- yet another identifying characteristic of the Third World, yet another yardstick of the degradation to which the U.S. workforce is being condemned.
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Footnote for Washingtonians: Tim Eyman is in fact the local agent of the Bush/Republican/corporate war on public transport, and one of Eyman's declared purposes is not only to halt the expansion of mass transit, but to shut down all the existing systems. Hence the unspeakable hypocrisy of the state's voters -- probably without precedent anywhere in the U.S.: they loudly proclaim themselves the most environmentally enlightened people in America, and yet consistently vote for Eyman's initiatives -- and therefore against public transportation: by huge fawning majorities at that.